“Skinny kid. Dark hair, pale skin, scar on his cheek. For a few days now he’s been bringing purses to that storeroom you think I don’t know about, behind the debris wall in the warehouse. Same M.O. as you—he dives into the water with the goods, surfaces empty-handed a few minutes later. What’s back there is none of my business, of course. But it attracts attention.”

“Scar like this?” She drew a fishhook shape on her cheek.

“Yes.”

“Nick.” Damn. “I’ll talk to him.”

“Okay,” Cat said. She stood and offered Izza a hand up, which Izza didn’t take. “It’s not all bad,” she said as they walked back into the warehouse together. “Being a priestess, I mean.”

“No,” Izza admitted. “But the congregation can be a pain.”

Chapter 9

9

Kai’s skin tasted enough of salt, but she salted it anyway, licked her wrist, drained the shot glass, bit the lime, slammed the glass, sucked the juice, dropped the peel. Three tequilas. Four.

Slices of discarded lime piled sticky and sour on the table at Makawe’s Rest. Four dead soldier shot glasses among the rind wreckage caught the light of tiki torches and table candles, and reflected a distortion of the beachside bar. A tableful of tattooed local kids close by cheered and held their hands up to be tied as the last poet left the stage: a sharp-faced Kavekanese woman who hadn’t yet remade herself, bright eyed with an elegant voice, verses slipping tense and tenseless from Kathic to Archipelagese and back. Kai wondered when she planned to join the priesthood, or if. Wasn’t much overlap between poetry and priestly duties, now that the gods were gone.

Closer to the stage, denim-clad Iskari expats clapped.

Across the table, Mako raised his whiskey to the level of his milk white eyes, and made a sound Kai had learned to call a laugh: rocks ground to sand, storm water beating a cliff face, works of man crumbled to dust.

“You think the Iskari understood any of that?” she asked.

Mako turned toward her unseeing. The gash of mouth in the scar tissue of his face opened to emit a voice. “Don’t need understanding to love.”

“Then maybe you love for the wrong reasons,” she said after she finished clapping.

“Love’s still love.”

“Get many girls with that line?”

“Haven’t had to worry about that particular problem for twenty years at least.”

The Rest swirled and surged around them, a hurricane of heat even without the four tequila shots burning in her gut.

At least the ocean wind cut through the swelter of close-packed drunken bodies. The Rest had no walls, and fronted on the bay. Behind them, waves rolled against the beach, and Penitents watched the horizon, screaming inside rock shells. Drunken sun-baked tourists lounged at the statues’ feet. Sand clung to wet skin, a casing, a ward.